


You're in Their History Books

by TUNiU



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Department of Temporal Investigations, IN SPACE!, POV Second Person, stranded in space, the law of relativity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 11:32:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18637291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: Reader is a Starfleet captain, with a problem. Your crew is stranded in space, with no hope of rescue. What do you do? Involve the Department of Temporal Investigations, because that's always a good idea.





	You're in Their History Books

_...Accessing memory engram…_

* * *

You stare down at the PADD, the words will forever be ingrained in your brain, but still you stare at them, willing them to change. Please, please, please, you beg to no one--you beg to the god your family stopped believing existed April 2063--you beg to Surak, and to The Prophets, and to the Q, and to any god who will listen. But there is no god to help you.

You make the decisions. You are the captain of this ship. Yours is a small ship, an explorer vessel, one of the old Excelsior class taken out of mothball museum after Wolf 359. It meant yours was one of the few explorers with no room for families

"Have you read this?," you ask your klingon first officer. She's always quick to defend you, with phasers or fists or words, but she can't protect you from this.

Of course she read it, she prepared the report for you. You're just wasting time. Time you now have an abundance of. Your ship's warp core and long range communication is damaged. Irrevocably, irreparably damaged. Your ship is on the fringes of known territory. You were just exploring. Measuring gravitic constants and mapping space time fluctuations to calculate the best, most time- and fuel-efficient routes from here to there for all future starships. The problem with being the first to map a sector is there is no one to call for help on short range systems.

"I have read it," she replies.

"It says we have maybe 15 minutes of useable warp. 15 minutes at warp 1. And then its impulse, 99 point 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 percent the speed of light. So what would you do?" you ask.

She says nothing.

You're 53 years old, finally made captain, (too much time as a lieutenant and lt.cmdr, you liked the freedom it gave you for reading) and Starfleet gives you a ship of scientists and tells you to go off... thataway...see what's out there. It's your first command, and you've stranded your crew. Sometimes the only choices you get are bad ones but you still have to choose. Because you know your options.

* * *

Here's what you know:

  1. Your ship is an Excelsior class on an exploratory mission to deep space. Starfleet has stocked you to the gills with provisions and supplies both material and materiel.
  2. You captain a ship of 723 crewmen, 2 pet dogs, 1 service dog, 3 pet cats, a service tribble, and 45 pet fish of varying species, (and a civilian cook whom you rescued from a broken starship five days ago and who demanded to pay for passage back to civilization with various recipes from his mom)
  3. Your crew are the smartest geeks you have ever met. If they gave your first officer these warp figures, then they are correct in every way.
  4. You are a month away (both subjective and objective) from the nearest starbase using warp.
  5. You are three years away from the nearest starbase using maximum impulse. Subjective. But relativity hits hard at almost-warp speeds. By the time you get there, three years will have passed for the crew. Thousands of years will have passed for everyone else.
  6. You don't doubt the Federation is long lasting but there is no doubt in your mind that by the time your ship reached the starbase, there would be no starbase there. Of course, the planetary system would still be there. People of some sort. But what kind, what level of technology they have...



* * *

So here are your choices:

  1. Stay where you are. Starfleet will notice you're missing, and will send rescue, eventually.
  2. Head home, and miss a thousand years. Your crew will miss their families.



* * *

Here's what you do:

"We'll stay here, for now. Starfleet knows our last position they should come looking when we miss our next check in," you tell your Number One. You tell her to inventory all their supplies, and create rationing schemes.

* * *

Here's what will happen:

Starfleet doesn't come looking. Your ship stays put, anchored in space, for lack of a better analogy. But your ship receives no short range communications from Starfleet, no rescue hails.

You wait a month. Two. Your crew is...restless. They are psychologically suited for long space voyages, long stretches away from home, but that's when they're doing something: mapping, calculating, sciencing. They're just staying put. Going nowhere. Doing nothing. Monitoring hailing frequencies that no one is using.

* * *

_...Accessing memory engram..._

* * *

After three months, you get your PADD and bring up the old report telling you the subjective and objective time calculations for your ships journey home at maximum impulse. You access the old captains' logs you loved reading as a el tee, and lt. cmdr...Archer, Sulu, Sisko, Janeway, La Forge...you need inspiration, you need an off-the-wall idea...or else the law of relativity will kill your entire crews' families by the time you get home...

Later, you will explain your idea and ask your chief engineer, "do you think this will work?"

He'll just shrug, wipe his greasy hands on his skirt, and say "probably not, but you have nothing to lose by trying."

* * *

This is what you do...you cheat time.

* * *

All Starfleet captains know the temporal prime directive, some get lucky enough to get away with breaking it. You hope you're lucky enough to get away with using it for your crew's benefit.

You make a captain's log, referencing your exact position in spacetime. You claim your crew found some mythological technological doo-hickey so powerful it can cause temporal disruptions. You lie like a dog, you bullshit a device so powerful it makes the Guardian of Forever look like a fairground ride. And then you say you're going to destroy it...tomorrow.

If there's one thing you know from reading captain's logs, it's that, though Starfleet may trying in earnest, they will never fully get rid of people just in it for themselves. Every department has one or two bad seeds. Even the Department of Temporal Investigations.

And you're right. No sooner do you finish your report, than a man in a dark uniform materializes on your bridge. He points a phaser at you, "give me the device," he demands.

The wonderful thing about him arriving on your ship, is the fact you will write about it in your next captain's log. The one you will write only when you and your crew get home safely. The one the Department of Temporal Investigations will read and seal away until it's time for them to intervene, right, about, now. A man and a woman materialize behind him, phasers pointed at him. It's quick work for them to secure him and beam him away to wherever their ship is.

"Take us home," you tell them. You hope you've been clever enough to lock them into a series of events that leads your crew home.

If they don’t take you home, you'll erase this latest captain's log and you will never record the one that leads them to their bad guy.

Except, they caught the bad guy, means they read the log, that you will record when your crew gets back to a starbase. The look on their faces when they realize what you are going to write is what they have to do. They have to rescue your crew...

* * *

 

_...End memory engram..._

* * *

  
"There's no need to be so smug about it," the chief judge tells you. She switches off the engram playback. The thoughts and emotions you felt during your time stranded in space filter out of the room once the signal ends.

Judge Admiral Janeway sits to the left, rubbing her temples with a headache. There's a Vulcan judge you don't recognize on the right. You stand in front of the military tribunal. You feel satisfied. A captain's duty is to the crew, you got your crew home safely. You feel a little smug.

They will find you innocent. You broke no temporal laws. You interfered with no time streams, nor changed any species' natural development. You lied on a captain's log. Captains have done that before, when they believed their logs were being intercepted. Captains have lied on logs to catch saboteurs and spies on their ships. You caught a spy from the future. They find you innocent, and tell you not to do it again because you are setting a dangerous precedent. Starfleet officers in the present cannot just bet on future officers reading their logs and saving their present ships.

The tribunal finds you innocent.

The Department of Temporal Investigations finds you eating dinner in Mozambique. They transport you away to their ship in the 29th century and they give you a new assignment. You seem to be the first Starfleet officer to understand the way temporal cause and effect interlock.

You ask them, "why me?"

"Because, you are the first Starfleet officer to understand the way temporal cause and effect interlock." You say no thanks. Because time travel is a mess, and you don't want anything more to do with it.

They don't mean that as a compliment.

Your new assignment is in their history books.

They look at you smugly.

**Author's Note:**

> I have absolutely no idea where this came from. That's a lie, it came from watching Johnathan Archer have a bsod every time Daniels invoked time travel. I just desperately wanted a Captain who was as smart about temporal shenanigans as Captain Kirk was with his Corbormite Maneuver. Why do Starfleet Captains (who have to be very smart, they're captains) always get confused with time travel? 
> 
> Also time travel is always shown as a plot to be solved, never as a tool to be used. My favorite sequences of time travel foolery is in Doctor Who. The Doctor and Amy and Rory are trapped in a Moebius Tardis, and the Doctor doesn't know what button to push to solve the conundrum. But, there is a Doctor who does know, so present Doctor plans to tell himself what button to push as soon as he knows, then taadaa a future Doctor comes to tell him what button to push, so now he knows and can tell his past self.


End file.
